Arts & Culture | Books

The Most of Nora Ephron is a one-stop shop for all your Ephron needs. The work anthologizes huge portions of the author’s career, publishing selections from her life as a Newsweek feature writer, an essayist, blogger, novelist, Oscar nominee for the screenplay When Harry Met Sally, and Tony award winner for her play “Lucky Guy,” about Daily News reporter Mike McAlary’s work on the Abner Louima story.

When Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel in 2001, David Landau was almost in mourning. He and his left-leaning friends thought of Sharon as a disaster, a warmonger. But Landau changed his mind, as he witnessed Sharon’s own transformation as a leader, ultimately breaking with his past and directing Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

Marina Rubin’s very short stories are shorter than most articles in this newspaper.

But she would never leave a sentence dangling like that. Each one of the 74 stories in “Stealing Cherries” (Manic D Press) unfolds into 14 to 18 lines — no paragraph breaks, few capital letters — that form a block of text on the page (the last word always ends at the right margin). Her writing is sparse and precise, yet also lush, with long sentences packed full of life, drama and artistry.

Joshua Safran was born into a world of communes, covens and radical politics, but was too young to understand what the revolution was all about. When he was 4, his single mother took off for places far less conventional, leaving the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco for the desert and hills. They lived in an old bus, a decommissioned ice-cream truck, a teepee and abandoned shacks with no running water, hitchhiking thousands of miles, ever in search of utopia.

Princeton — Over a kosher Chinese meal at a Lunch & Learn program in Princeton University’s Center for Jewish Life, a visiting academic offered some chosen words about language — “Jewish language,” that is — one recent afternoon.